How action games can improve our visual skills

A little gaming goes a long way when it comes to our brains' processing of sight.

Believe it or not, playing this game could be a good treatment for lazy eye, according to preliminary research.

At this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the University of Rochester's Daphne Bavelier described her work on how video games affect the visual system. Bavelier's work focuses on action games and goes back over a decade. In that span, she has generated lots of evidence that the games are capable of improving the visual system by enhancing the functions of the brain regions that process sight.

The general outline of her studies are fairly similar: take novice gamers, and have them play either an action game (typically a first-person shooter), strategy game, or memory game. The amount of gaming is actually quite small: one hour a day, five days a week. "This is no excuse for binging," Bavelier said, noting that small doses work better than five hours a day spent gaming. Then, at the end of the training period, the participants are given a test of visual acuity.

A number of the results are exactly what you'd expect from a situation where fast reactions in complicated scenes are at a premium: gamers are better at picking out details in a cluttered scene, as well as picking out objects in low-contrast images. Although this isn't especially surprising, Bavelier noted that these are visual traits we often correct with glasses, so the improvements could actually have a medical impact, forestalling the need for vision correction.

Another visual capability that sees a boost from action gaming is the ability to make a quick, rough estimate of relative counts. In the example shown during Bavelier's talk, participants were shown a collection of yellow and blue dots and asked to pick out which color is present on the majority of the dots. As the ratio got closer to one, the task became more difficult, but action gamers were able to produce accurate estimates more easily than the controls.

Again, this may seem like a fairly inconsequential boost, but the task relies on what's termed our approximate number system, something that's evolutionarily ancient. Perhaps more significantly, differences in the human approximate number system have, in various studies, accounted for about 30 percent of the variation in math scores. Other gains (which showed up after subjects played Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) came in the form of improved 3D reasoning. Gamers found it easier to perform mental rotations of geometric shapes, and the improvements persisted for five months after the study wrapped up.

The biggest commonality in the effects seen in these studies came in the top-down direction of visual attention, Bavelier said. But there is variation among the participants; the same game won't have an identical effect on all players. Not all action games are created equally when it comes to the visual system, either. The studies tend to see stronger effects when players are not simply reacting to changes, but rather driving the changes.

What's next for this research? Bavelier said she'd like to see it used for practical purposes. She highlighted amblyopia, or "lazy eye," which is caused when the brain doesn't devote equal resources to both eyes. By showing the two eyes different things, it's possible to force the brain to even out the vision between the two eyes. In a preliminary study, a modded version of Unreal Tournament 2004 showed promise in this kind of treatment, leading the group to start a preclinical study. (Bavelier is also named on a patent for the approach.)

The need to modify the games being studied highlighted another challenge for this research. Bavelier said it's often difficult to force a game engine to do everything her experiments need, and for ethical reasons, she needs to be able to adjust the level of violence in the games. But help may be on the way; she said the National Science Foundation has funded a game studio called E Line Media to create a research game engine.

Am I allowed to send a link to this article to my mom? Doing it anyway.

edit: actually, anecdotally, the evidence that it may stave off the need for corrective vision holds up in my immediate family (although I don't know about the heredity of eyesight). My mother needed glasses before she was 10, and my dad somewhere in his late 20's. I'm a bit past the later at the moment and holding down 20/20. My non-gaming siblings have had glasses/contacts since high school.

I've been saying for years that videogames have helped me out with image recognition, spacial manipulation, and other similar visual/visualization skills. Heck, chat in multiplayer games really drove up my typing speed, too.

It would be interesting if they investigated how to improve camera systems in video games to avoid motion sickness and eyestrain, improving visual player experience, etc. From feedback on my game mechanics engine (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/181564), I found that users required an option to disable camera rotation easing. In principle I believed easing would prevent vertigo, but it's actually the other way around. Apparently the brain thinks the scene is still moving after the rotation input has been released, giving the wrong feedback. I also got an interesting comment from an Oculus user:

"To avoid motion sickness I simply never rotate the camera with anything other than the device's *ometers.. The moment i turn it with a mouse/joystick it's like a William Gibson pukefest. Ideal configuration would be a wireless oculus and controller and sit playing on a chair you can rotate 360."

There are also minimal, yet important, details to investigate like for example: is it better to place the third person character in the middle of the screen, or sideways? I haven't found consensus on this. And so on.

I wonder if a game like Geometry Wars would show the same results? Lots of tracking and hand eye coordination plus less graphic violence.

I'd guess yes as far as hand-eye coordination goes, especially when you ramp up the difficulty. Take Touhou for example.If you can find your way through that cloud of death, (the genre is referred to as danmaku, literally translated as "bullet rain", for a reason), you obviously have some seriously good hand-eye coordination. Memorization only goes so far when there's more space on the playing field that will instantly kill you than not.

And while it's true that there's not much 3D reasoning going on in the game, training your brain to process the location and speed of so many different objects while filtering out which ones are to be avoided, which ones are to be collected, and which ones can be ignored, WHILE trying to path-find through them can only help your visual cortex.

Of course, if you wanted 3D training as well, you could always play one of the 3D fangames

I wonder if a game like Geometry Wars would show the same results? Lots of tracking and hand eye coordination plus less graphic violence.

I'd guess yes as far as hand-eye coordination goes, especially when you ramp up the difficulty. Take Touhou for example.[img ]http://i.imgur.com/Ao9r9az.jpg[/ img]If you can find your way through that cloud of death, (the genre is referred to as danmaku, literally translated as "bullet rain", for a reason), you obviously have some seriously good hand-eye coordination. Memorization only goes so far when there's more space on the playing field that will instantly kill you than not.

And while it's true that there's not much 3D reasoning going on in the game, training your brain to process the location and speed of so many different objects while filtering out which ones are to be avoided, which ones are to be collected, and which ones can be ignored, WHILE trying to path-find through them can only help your visual cortex.

Of course, if you wanted 3D training as well, you could always play one of the 3D fangames

I wonder if a game like Geometry Wars would show the same results? Lots of tracking and hand eye coordination plus less graphic violence.

I'd guess yes as far as hand-eye coordination goes, especially when you ramp up the difficulty. Take Touhou for example.If you can find your way through that cloud of death, (the genre is referred to as danmaku, literally translated as "bullet rain", for a reason), you obviously have some seriously good hand-eye coordination. Memorization only goes so far when there's more space on the playing field that will instantly kill you than not.

And while it's true that there's not much 3D reasoning going on in the game, training your brain to process the location and speed of so many different objects while filtering out which ones are to be avoided, which ones are to be collected, and which ones can be ignored, WHILE trying to path-find through them can only help your visual cortex.

Of course, if you wanted 3D training as well, you could always play one of the 3D fangames

The important thing for games like that is tight controls. Even the slightest lag will frustrate.

I regularly recommend young patients with Amblyopia use a small, hand held gaming device for an hour or two a day (I'm an optometrist). When the normally seeing eye is patched, the amblyopic eye is forced to "work" to see the tiny detail on the screen. In this way the side of the brain responsible for the amblyopic eye is learning to see better - yes, vision is a learned phenomenon, much like speech. The fact that the game is challenging, and fun makes this form of therapy very useful. Parents, though, sometimes give me the hairy eyeball look when I tell their kid that it's a good idea to play on the DS for a couple of hours per day!

Correction: "Lazy eye" refers to strabismus, in which the eyes are misaligned. Amblyopia is indeed a neurological condition in which visual processing of the image from one eye is impaired, leading to reduced visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, etc. Strabismus can cause amblyopia, but it is not the only cause of amblyopia. Most research like this focuses on how games can improve the visual function in amblyopic patients, regardless of the cause. There is some research that uses stereoscopic 3D displays and video games to correct strabismus.

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Anyway I wonder if she get's similar results for those who already have poor visual acuity, or even colorblindness?

Poor visual acuity has multiple causes. The most common cause is optical. Myopia, or 'near-sightedness', is the usual type people think about when they refer to poor visual acuity. Myopic eyes are too long, so distant objects are focused in front of the retina. The image the retina actually gets is blurry. It's possible that video games could marginally improve what the brain can do with this blurry image, but there's only so much that can be done with a fundamentally bad signal. Plus this condition is easily fixed with glasses. Oh, and you'd have to play the games without your glasses on with screen far enough away that it looks blurry.

People with amblyopia also already have poor visual acuity, but the image at the retina is actually perfectly clear. Instead, the brain isn't properly processing the image. In principle, proper training and experience could restore visual acuity to normal levels by teaching the brain how to process the image correctly.

Colorblindness is a genetic condition in which the retina is missing one or more of the photoreceptors that respond to certain wavelengths of light. Like myopia, this sends a 'bad' signal to the brain. No amount of training can teach the brain to recover colors from light the retina couldn't detect in the first place!

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what are the ethical reasons?

Most likely the fact that this type of intervention is most effective on very very young children, whose parents might object to high levels of violence. No reason to exclude those children from the research or the treatment.

From the article: "The biggest commonality in the effects seen in these studies came in the top-down direction of visual attention, Bavelier said."

What does she mean here?

Visual attention is what it sounds like: how you pay attention to specific objects that you can see. Sometimes, something draws your attention involuntarily, like a bright flash. People call this form 'bottom-up' attention. 'Top-down' attention is when you willfully concentrate on something in the world. Both types actually rustle up additional processing power from your brain that improves your perception of the part of the world you're paying attention to. What she's saying is that it looks like the biggest improvement in amblyopic patients comes from how effectively the brain can allocate additional processing power to the part of the world the patient is paying attention to.

Correction: "Lazy eye" refers to strabismus, in which the eyes are misaligned. Amblyopia is indeed a neurological condition in which visual processing of the image from one eye is impaired, leading to reduced visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, etc. Strabismus can cause amblyopia, but it is not the only cause of amblyopia. Most research like this focuses on how games can improve the visual function in amblyopic patients, regardless of the cause. There is some research that uses stereoscopic 3D displays and video games to correct strabismus.

Quote:

Anyway I wonder if she get's similar results for those who already have poor visual acuity, or even colorblindness?

Poor visual acuity has multiple causes. The most common cause is optical. Myopia, or 'near-sightedness', is the usual type people think about when they refer to poor visual acuity. Myopic eyes are too long, so distant objects are focused in front of the retina. The image the retina actually gets is blurry. It's possible that video games could marginally improve what the brain can do with this blurry image, but there's only so much that can be done with a fundamentally bad signal. Plus this condition is easily fixed with glasses. Oh, and you'd have to play the games without your glasses on with screen far enough away that it looks blurry.

People with amblyopia also already have poor visual acuity, but the image at the retina is actually perfectly clear. Instead, the brain isn't properly processing the image. In principle, proper training and experience could restore visual acuity to normal levels by teaching the brain how to process the image correctly.

This is actually what we are doing with my 6 year old. He has glasses that are basically just a plastic lens in one eye, and almost a magnifying glass on the other, as well as having to wear a patch for a good portion of his day over his 'good' eye, to force the brian to make the connections it needs to make. He says its helping a little bit(it seems to be according to the eye doctor.)

From the article: "The biggest commonality in the effects seen in these studies came in the top-down direction of visual attention, Bavelier said."

What does she mean here?

Visual attention is what it sounds like: how you pay attention to specific objects that you can see. Sometimes, something draws your attention involuntarily, like a bright flash. People call this form 'bottom-up' attention. 'Top-down' attention is when you willfully concentrate on something in the world. Both types actually rustle up additional processing power from your brain that improves your perception of the part of the world you're paying attention to. What she's saying is that it looks like the biggest improvement in amblyopic patients comes from how effectively the brain can allocate additional processing power to the part of the world the patient is paying attention to.

So, another way of putting it is: Top-down attention is seeing the forest first, then recognizing individual trees. Bottom-up attention is seeing a bunch of trees, and then piecing together that you are in a forest?

I'm a much better player on the ice when I'm playing something like NHL 2k8 often. It even helps with mental things.

Surprised they didn't do any reaction time tests.

Anecdotally, in my high school Statistics class, our final project was on whether or not playing video games made an individual's reaction time decrease (make them faster). The test was very short term, and likely holds no real scientific value, but it was fun anyway.We had the participants take a few reaction time tests on a computer, and figured out a rough baseline. Then we had them play Twisted Metal for some specified time (I forget how long) and take the reaction time test again afterwards.Oddly enough, the male participants were statistically faster than they were before playing the video game. We had no outliers; this was across all male participants. The women, on the other hand were all over the board, with some being faster, some being slower, but most of them being statistically the same.I would really like to see the results of a real test on this to see if a properly done study actually came up with similar results, and what the reasoning behind them could be if it did.